ITV and Carwow Launch Auto Match

ITV and Carwow, the UK’s largest online destination for car changing, today announce their new retail commerce partnership – Auto Match. A groundbreaking new advertising solution available through ITV’s advanced self-serve programmatic platform Planet V, it will empower car advertisers to connect with known active car buyers through ITVX.

Auto Match, TV’s first dedicated commerce solution in the Autos market, is powered by Carwow’s extensive first-party data. By securely matching Carwow’s audience data with ITVX’s registered users, Auto Match enables precise audience targeting. This allows car manufacturers to reach over 1.3 million known active new car buyers and measure post-ad exposure uplift on key metrics such as website traffic, car configurations, and sales.

Carwow has a wealth of first party data from logged in users who are actively configuring and researching cars. ITV’s data offers car manufacturing advertising partners precise audience targeting to in-market audiences at crucial points of the purchase journey. This is the company’s first offsite commerce media offering.

Carwow Group reaches 7.3M unique users a month and is responsible for 10% of the UK’s retail new car sales. Carwow’s media business enables automotive brands with targeted, data-driven advertising across the UK, Germany and Spain and delivered a record 600 global campaigns in 2024. In the UK alone, Carwow’s media revenue grew by an impressive 67% year-on-year as it deepened strategic partnerships with 45 OEMs. ITV owns a minority stake in Carwow through ITV AdVentures Invest, its Media for Equity programme.

Jay Rajdev, Controller of Advanced Advertising, ITV said: “By combining ITVX’s scale and power with Carwow’s high-quality auto intender graph, we are providing Autos advertisers with an unparalleled opportunity to connect with in-market car buyers and drive measurable results. It’s something we’ve done really successfully with FMCG brands through our existing Planet V solutions such as Retail Match, but Auto Match brings the commerce audience opportunity to an important new sector with huge potential for further growth.”

Sepi Arani, Carwow Global Managing Director – Commercial and Media, said: “By leveraging our deep understanding of in-market car changers, this partnership with ITV will help our car manufacturer and dealer group partners reach our audiences beyond the Carwow platform, in this case when they are watching their favourite TV programmes. We’re continuing to expand our Commerce Media offering driving highly effective and targeted advertising and Auto Match is the latest in a line of data-driven innovations to give our partners access to even richer and contextual audiences.”

A beta launch of Auto Match is targeting key automotive segments, with a pilot programme kicking off with select advertisers.

The launch complements and builds on the success of other Planet V addressable targeting solutions for advertisers including Retail Match (formerly Matchmaker),which matches ITV’s existing first-party data with Tesco’s Clubcard and Boots’ Advantage Card databases, allowing advertisers to better target retail audiences and measure results.